


your soul is on fire (a shot in the dark)

by redledgers



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Archfey!Vex, F/M, Feywild, Warlock!Percy, orthax - Freeform, warlock pact
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-09
Updated: 2017-01-09
Packaged: 2018-09-16 02:08:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9268970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redledgers/pseuds/redledgers
Summary: Percival makes a pact with an Archfey who offers him power and a little help in exchange for his soul





	

**Author's Note:**

> many thanks to cinderfell for letting me in on this idea, originally from the CR Discord channel.

The cold leaves crunch underfoot, frozen in place after an ice storm had swept through Whitestone the day before. He is back because he has nothing left to lose, no reason to live any longer. Her presence lingers beside him, coiling up like smoke before he realizes that the smoke is his alone and she is not there. His fingers flex, ghosting over the revolver tucked at his hip. The city has not changed, as if the storm was merely a spell to keep it just as it was.

A root snakes up from the ground, catching his foot and swirling around his calf before he can step out of the forest proper. He turns and she’s there, leaning against a tree watching him. The woods have always been Vex’ahlia’s kingdom. “Darling,” she starts, her voice low and sultry. “You thought I would let you do this without me?”

There’s no reason for him to do anything without her; his powers came from her long before he understood them. _The pact, darling, she’d said when she found him again (and again), you have such a beautiful soul._ He wonders what she thinks of his soul now, wonders if one day she’ll place it in her trophy case along with countless others, building a hoard to rival the fey that stole hers. Aloud he says, “I wondered if you would come along.” He offers his hand and she comes to meet him, suspending time as she moves silently over the frozen ground.

When she touches his hand, fingertips resting against his, the smoke curls around her form. She looks him over, an eyebrow raised. “I told him you were not up for bargaining.”

Her eyes are icy but they remain enigmatic, so he pulls out his gun, runs the barrel down her cheek before presenting it to her. “We struck another deal of sorts,” he says, “but this is still yours.” There are other things that are hers, things that were asked implicitly, things she has yet to take for herself (there are so many things he wishes she would take for herself, but he is content to wait until this is over). But the smoke recedes, settling at his feet like the cat he vaguely remembers having as a child.

“I promised you this,” she replies, pressing so close he can almost feel the rough bark through his jacket. He knows already, the echo of her promise has never faded since the moment it was embedded into his world on the edge of a riverbank. There had been nothing left for him then either. Nothing but a weak desire to wring out the bodies of those who had betrayed him and his family. ”Well, come along then,” she says then, the root receding into the earth.

Dark viscous blood and charred bodies are all that’s left when they take the castle in a tangle of gunfire and thorny arrows. Perhaps he delights in it too much, smoke billowing around him until she nearly loses him in the darkness. There, in the center of the great hall, stepping over the broken body of Delilah Briarwood, in the middle of Sylas’s ashes, she pulls him close and kisses him. _Your soul is forfeit_ , he thinks, but she does not take it, not in this moment. Instead she takes the smoke with a flick of her wrist, swirling it into a ball and shooing it away.

The clatter of metal on the stone floor is enough to make him jump and draw his gun once more. She is calmer as she turns to survey the remaining figure (he thinks it must be an apparition, there is no reason this is true). He hears the subtle incantation she had begun die on her lips before she looks back at him, wide eyed.

“Percival?” His name rings clear in the space, the first time he has heard it uttered in these walls in too many years. The figure, clear now, steps hesitantly toward him, waiting for a sign, and he wishes he knew what sign she wanted. All his body knows now is movement, and he meets her halfway, catching her as she flings herself into his arms. At some point he may have thought it poetic, but now it is desperation.

“Cassandra.” His words are muffled in her shoulder. When he looks back, Vex’ahlia is sitting, the pattern of bark across her skin fading ever so slightly. Cassandra looks too, alarmed at the archfey who has nothing to hide (she has so much to hide; he knows only what he has read in books but she has lost someone to, and in this moment he _knows_ ). “I would say she’s a friend,” he begins. He is not allowed to finish, the smoke that had been shooed away overtakes him and he is knocked to the ground.

She is at his side in an instant, nudging Cassandra out of the way, removing his glasses carefully. “You’ve gotten your payment, and you know I made first claim.” He feels the coolness of her fingertips skate down the bridge of his nose, over his lips, and down to his chest. She coaxes the demon from him. “He is mine,” she hisses. “Take your spoils and be gone.” In that moment, it leaves, really and truly leaves, and he chokes on his own breath in a fit.

There’s a tug inside him, like his soul knows the pact is, by all accounts, over for him. There is no resolution to his initial rage, it is now gutted with creeping guilt; his sister was never truly gone, his family never truly ended. When he lies in bed, _his bed, from before, like it had never been touched, not even by dust,_ Vex’ahlia wraps herself around him as a vine finds purchase on a tree. He wishes in this moment he was bereft of emotion, but she knows him too well, has watched him ever since he had met her one darkened night in a room adjacent, too many years ago.

In the darkness where too many questions linger, she asks one more: will you take this thing I hold dear? And he knows this is not the way of the archfey, this is not what the wandering woman, the mistress of the hunt, the startlingly powerful Vex’ahlia, is supposed to do. He wrests control over his own heart and thinks she should be asking for his, to fill where his soul has been tattered.

In the morning she is gone, back to the Feywild, her offer now tangible in the guise of a folded leaf left beside his glasses. He follows her with the help of a young druid, and this wilderness overwhelms anything he could have imagined (he thinks he spots her beneath a tree but she has never worn a black cloak and he feels no bond even at this distance). Something else rules here, something dark and sinister that has been covered with new growth. Time has stopped passing and so he stops counting sleep cycles as if they mean anything here. In his search for her, he stumbles upon a bear, a great celestial being. The bear roars and it shakes the earth, the shockwaves of spirit and sound pulsing around him until he fears he may have met an unwilling acquaintance. _The bear, he remembers, the small bear she may have rescued, the legends say only but once, but perhaps the legends mistake what is important._

“Trinket, darling, not everything requires my immediate attention.” He looks up and can barely see her amidst the branches—she is wilder here. There are twigs and leaves tangled in her braid, the darkened bark of her skin rougher as she presses her cheek to his. Her bow is slung over her back as if it grows there. “My warlock,” she says softly when she steps back.

His fingers crackle with electricity, and he notices for the first time that he has been carrying the leaf. It shrivels and smokes, disintegrating before he can show her. _My Vex’ahlia, what can I give you in exchange_? His life, perhaps. An answer rises unbidden, cut off too soon when the bear returns (when had it left?), a dark haired man held in its mouth. The man squirms and swears as he is dropped inelegantly to the forest floor, surging up with a dagger in hand only to be stilled by her hand. As fast as the dagger falls from his fingers so falls his arm from her grasp, and Percival sees why.

(She takes his soul in the end, but not in the traditional way, not the way he read as a child when he learned about something too powerful to comprehend. She buys him life, offers forgiveness as readily as breath, and takes him with her as gently as she can. He cannot stay there with her, but she always comes back to the material plane.)

(His power grows, his sister laughs, and he feels as if his whole world has shifted, there are moments he wonders if it will snap back, trapping him in sharp teeth. When he wakes from another nightmare she is there. He feels as if his humanity returns when he makes her laugh, yet another moment in his workshop he will treasure.)

The smoke comes for him one last time, voracious for more, a disgusting hunger to tear him limb for limb, and she lets him kill it, dispelling it into the ether. The demon has gone, but he conjures his own smoke, crafts a flower, and blows it toward her. She sees Whitestone rebuilt, gardens overflowing, and he brings the young druid in to his home. There they stay for a thousand years, more if she’ll let him, in a place that time left to die, an endless cycle of nothingness. Their home there is brighter, and when she hides her nature, she charms even the gruffest of merchants into a bargain.

“Darling,” she says one evening, wildness faded and dark skin flushed. Solemnness has no place in their bed, in the fleeting moments before the dawn creeps over the mountains and launches into the sky, in the time just before the sun dips down into darkness. “Darling, you have such a beautiful soul.”

And he offers it freely.


End file.
